Sure any adult can do it but some adult has to do it or the baby will die. As such the child is siphoning resources from some caretaker. Time and money.
YogSoth’s POV seems to be the fetus is a parasite and as such lives or dies at the whim of the mother (caretaker) right up to the instant before the umbilical cord is cut.
Thing is after the umbilical is cut the baby’s needs increase from when it was in the mother. It requires active effort on the part of caretakers to live. It requires more resource outlays for its survival (clothes at the least). Its status as a parasite continues minus the physical connection to the mother after birth.
So, if it is a parasite its caretakers should have the choice of life or death over it by his logic.
Well I do think there is some gray area between the time when a fetus is essentially a parasite, completely dependent upon the host to continue to develop, and when it’s a baby that can be taken care of by anyone that’s willing. That time is probably the third trimester, and personally I’m against third trimester abortions because by that point the baby could be born (prematurely) but still be developed enough to not solely depend on its mother for development.
My take on this issue is that up until the point where a baby can be born and survive on its own (obviously with care) it’s not a person, it’s an undeveloped grouping of cells and tissue. To me, preventing the continued development of a jumble of biological matter incapable of survival without you and only you is not murder. If it were, masturbation would be considered genocide. You’re not taking life away from something, you’re merely preventing life from occurring in the first place.
But I certainly don’t expect to win anyone over in this discussion. Abortion is just one of those topics that 90% of people’s opinions are essentially set in stone.
To be clear I am not arguing with you but YogSoth’s take on it. He departs from us in that he feels the mother should be allowed to kill the baby right up to the instant before the umbilical is cut. As such I think he is stretching the notion that it is a parasite thus at the whim of the mother out of all recognition. I merely extended that notion to try to portray its absurdity and show how it is morally bankrupt.
By-and-large I personally feel the same as you on the subject (as you just described it).
Personally I don’t see survivability as being relevent to personhood - it’s relevent to responsibility for that person’s survival. That is, there is a level of hardship we do not ask people to do, even to save another person’s life. So, if we presume a fetus has finally become person, then we shouldn’t kill it on a whim - which explains why most pro-choicers oppose casual abortion in the third trimester.
For most of us, the key issue is whether the fetus counts as a person yet. I suppose some people could base this on viability, but that doesn’t make sense to me; I do it by cognition and levels of intelligence. Below a certain level, it’s not a person to me, and I feel it can be killed with impunity regardless of it’s viability. An adult cow is certainly a viable independent organism, and I’m fine with it being killed for trivial reasons.
Now, it is worth noting that viability could effect whether an abortion is the best way to unburden a woman of a fetus or zygote. If a woman wants to shed herself of a fetus and it can be put into an incubator and brought to term (without having to slice up the woman too horribly to get it out), then I say, feel free! There’s no moral obligation to do so, but so long as you take full responsibility for the result, I don’t mind incubatoring rather than aborting. However, forcing the woman to be an incubator for you is reprehensible on a level precisely equivalent to grabbing people and stealing their ‘redundant’ organs.
Whatever personhood is, it has to be something related to our minds, so a thing without a mind cannot be a person. Exactly what level of mind is necessary is a gray area, and difficult to pin down: A five year old dog has, in most respects, greater mental capacity than a newborn human, and yet most will agree that the newborn human has a greater degree of personhood than the dog. But certainly a human zygote or embryo before the development of nervous tissue cannot be a person, and probably not one before the start of brain activity.
Personhood cannot be defined in terms of being human, because doing so fails to account both for nonhuman persons and nonperson human things. In the former case, angels, aliens, artificially intelligent computers, and elves (without comment on whether any of those exist) should all be regarded as persons, even though none of them are human. By contrast, a HeLa culture is undoubtedly human in a biological sense, and is alive and self-sufficient, but can’t by any stretch be called a person.
I’ll ignore the abortion part for the moment since, like AHunter3, I don’t consider personhood necessary or sufficient for that debate.
A person, to me, is an individual life form with a certain level of mental ability and a personality. Hypothetically, a machine could be a person and hypothetically a Homo sapiens might not be.
To borrow from Star Trek, a Vulcan is a person. A Borg? Maybe not (maybe all Borg together form a single person). V’ger? Yes.
This brings up an interesting point to me (as have many other posts in this thread). I’ve often wondering if there is any research going on anywhere into transplanting human embryoes. Research I’ve done shows that it is done with animals (cattle and such). I recognize that there are ethical considerations (for example, we don’t know what detrimental effect this might have on the embryo), but it seems to me, for those who feel very strongly that abortion is murder and want to save babies, it seems like that might be one way to do it. Does anyone know if there is such research being done? Or can anyone explain to me why that’s not an option?
Hope this isn’t too much of a “Hi, Jack!” If it is, I could mebbe start a thread…
I often get the impression from anti-abortion types that their point of view is dependent upon the existence of a “soul” or something like that. Since the person-defining “soul” has zero scientific validity, it can been asserted as existing arbitrarily whenever, even at conception. Clump of cells + soul = person. Whether they use the word “soul” or not, it seems to me that many (most?) anti-abortion types treat the word “person” magically and indefinably, quite literally akin to the word “soul.”
If you don’t believe in souls, as I do not, defining a person is far more problematic. Clearly, if cognition (or, potential cognition) is an essential component to being a person, then a late-term fetus which might be viable has a much stronger claim to personhood than a zygote.
The next question is simply what does the law require regarding protecting the rights of a fetus to the degree a fetus is definable as a person. In short, a person is what the Law (to the degree it is enforceable by the State) says it is. Presently, in the U.S. and in most industrialized nations, a fetus is not a person with rights endowed by the State, but a baby is. There will never be a clear line that can be drawn to the satisfaction of everyone, unless God himself comes down and defines an ultimate Law. Since that has not and will not happen, we’re stuck with human Law.
What becomes obvious in any discussion like this is that there will be no agreement on any of these points.
Another problem with that argument is that even if they do have souls, so what? If a mindless lump of cells can have a soul, that’s just an argument for souls not being important. They might as well argue that rocks have souls so we shouldn’t dig mines.
Souls don’t make the question any simpler, since you still have to have some way of determining what things have and do not have souls. That determination has to be made either based on observable characteristics of the thing, in which case you could just use those characteristics directly as your basis for comparison, or it has to be decreed by some authority, and the most-recognized such authority in the US, the Bible, is silent on the matter (it does imply that a fetus has a soul some time before birth, but not precisely when).
The attraction that m/f have for each other I believe is the desire of the woman to give life to a certain aspect of that man, to have a child - regardless of what her mind says it’s her heart that desires the child. As such the female selects the child her soul/heart wants and desires. The child is part of the soul of the father at this time. During the sexual union that child is being coaxed to separate him/herself from the man and become a total person. Once that child agrees with that a new person is formed totally complete. IMHO Physically this would happen at ejaculation.
Come now, souls make things very simple. You simply declare that your god told you that zygotes get souls at conception, so they’re babies and people and miscarrages are murder. Done!
And liberals quoting the bible don’t count as an authority; only his pastor paraphrasing what might be in the bible is. It’s divine inspirationed interpretation, see.
On preview: Aaand there you have your divine inspirationed interpretation! Pastor-free! (And wet dreams are murder!)
For me, it’s about survival status. Here’s how I break it down:
Embryo, Zygote, fetus-- anything in the womb is clearly not a person. It won’t survive at it’s present state if removed.
Babies - ALSO not people. They are not capable of making decisions providing care for themselves. They need a grown person to provide.
I can only consider beings capable of surviving on their own as people. Not necessarily in a society sense. I don’t care how much their money earning potential is.
And no, souls don’t exist just because you want them to.
You proceed from a false assumption - that pro-choicers feelings about “what makes a person” or when a “fetus” is a “person” makes any difference.
To me - being pro-choice is recognizing that my feelings and beliefs have no role in those of the person doing the choosing - I could feel/believe that every sperm is sacred and its only purpose is to be shoved into a vagina for procreation - but that has no bearing on what someone else might believe, or what they should choose to do with the parasite that is growing within them.
That is what Pro-Choice is about - allowing people to choose the medical procedures they want for the purposes they want them - all other arguments about “sanctity of life” , “fetus = human with rights”, etc are all diversions from the point at hand.
